Monday, 25 November 2013

cosmology - How can cosmic inflation make an infinite universe homogeneous?

Inflation is used to explain why the observable universe is extremely homogeneous.



Without inflation, we can do the following crude calculation. The cosmic microwave background was formed about 300,000 years after the big bang, at a redshift of about 1100. Thus causally connected regions at the epoch of CMB formation would have a radius of $sim 300,000$ light years, which has now expanded by a factor of 1100 to be $3.3times 10^{8}$ light years in radius.



This can be compared with the radius of the observable universe, which is currently around 46 billion light years. This means that causally connected regions should only be $sim 4 times 10^{-7}$ of the observable universe, or equivalently, patches of CMB of $sim 2$ degrees radius on the sky are causally connected. This is clearly not the case as the variations in the CMB are no more than about 1 part in $10^{5}$ across the whole sky.



Inflation solves this by allowing previously causally connected regions to inflate to become larger than the entire observable universe.



You appear to understand this quite well, so I am not entirely clear what your question is. We cannot know whether the entire universe is homogeneous, since we cannot measure it. The cosmological principle is an assumption that appears to hold approximately true in the observable universe, but need not apply to the universe as a whole. Indeed it is not absolutely true in the observable universe otherwise it would be quite uninteresting, containing no galaxies, clusters, or other structure. I think the only requirement on inflation is that it blows up a patch of causally connected universe so that it becomes much bigger than the observable universe at the current epoch.

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